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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23735062">Claim Your Ghost</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/pseuds/ClaraxBarton'>ClaraxBarton</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>AU Alphabet [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Indiana Jones Fusion, Angst, BAMF Jessica Moore, Brother Angst, F/M, Former Military Dean Winchester, Former Military Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore Lives, Jewish Campbells, Jewish Character, Jewish Winchesters, M/M, Post-World War II, Well - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 00:21:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,013</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23735062</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/pseuds/ClaraxBarton</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>John Winchester dies with seven dollars and fifty-three cents in his pocket. </p><p> </p><p>--</p><p>An Indiana Jones AU fit that isn't at all what I set out to write or that you want to read.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Benoit Blanc (Knives Out)/Dean Winchester, Cassie Robinson/Dean Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>AU Alphabet [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1685266</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Only the Most Beautiful</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Claim Your Ghost</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/gifts">Flowerparrish</a>, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/gifts">sarahcakes613</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>1. I'm ALIVE. It's been a shit two-is weeks, sorry. I've been sewing a lot of masks to donate to orgs and also for people who need them (hit me up on twitter or Tumblr if you need or know someone who does). And then I sprained my ankle very badly and I've been laid up wallowing so.</p><p>2. I'm going to get through all 26 letters, but it might have to drag into May a bit because, as you might have noticed, it's the 19th now.</p><p>3. This is supposed to be an Indiana Jones AU and let me start by saying I KNOW. It's post war and not pre-war and clearly that is the only difference. I'm kidding. A bit.</p><p>4. Now edited by the Amazing Ro!!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>October, 1949</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>John Winchester dies with seven dollars and fifty-three cents in his pocket. </p><p> </p><p>His body is found draped over a broken, crumbled headstone in a crumbled, forgotten cemetery in Meridian, Idaho by Pastor Jim Murphy, the same man who asked John to come to Meridian in the first place to investigate a strange and disturbing series of events. </p><p> </p><p>John’s belongings can all fit into the haversack he had carried with him for the last thirty years. </p><p> </p><p>Pastor Jim salts and burns John’s body, and he keeps the haversack safe, and he tries not to think about the fact that when he found John’s body, his oldest friend was missing an arm and an eye and his lips had been curved into a grotesque kind of smile in death that never would have graced John’s features in life.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>Dean Winchester is in Minnesota when John’s death catches up to him.</p><p> </p><p>He has just finished dispatching a nest of vampires - just six, nothing to brag about after all the other shit he’s got carved into the mental list of monsters he’s dealt with. </p><p> </p><p>He has only been back to hunting - proper hunting, as John Winchester called it - for sixteen months. Has only been hunting on his own for the last seven, when John decided Dean hadn’t actually forgotten everything a lifetime of first-hand experience had taught him.</p><p> </p><p>A friend of a friend of a friend - no friend of John’s, because Pastor Jim is the only man alive who could or would claim to be a friend to John Winchester - has the shitty job of telling Dean his father is dead in Idaho.</p><p> </p><p>It doesn’t take long for Dean to pack up - his stained and patched olive duffel bag, only eight years old now but beaten to hell and back, holds his whole life - and then he’s on the road.</p><p> </p><p>Dean’s ride these days is a 1929 Indian Scout, a beauty of a bike he got from a beauty of a woman named Dorothy not long after Dean got back from the Philippines. </p><p> </p><p>Two days after wiping vampire blood off of his machetes, Dean is pulling up to the crumbled, forgotten church Pastor Jim heads up these days, and the sun is bright and hot and all Dean can feel is cold.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry, son,” Pastor Jim says when he hands Dean John’s haversack.</p><p> </p><p>They stare at each other for an awkward moment over that choice of words, but Dean rolls his shoulders in a shrug and forces his face into something approaching neutral.  </p><p> </p><p>He turns down Pastor Jim’s offer of a place to sleep - the last church Dean had slept in had been destroyed by the Japanese and destroyed even more by Americans and, besides all of that, Dean wants nothing more than to find a dark corner and a deep bottle and drown himself.</p><p> </p><p>So he does just that, procuring a bottle and a room at some kind of bar/tavern/saloon that makes Dean think of the shitty western dime novels he used to read when he was a kid and thought monsters and humans weren’t the same thing.</p><p> </p><p>Dean shoves a chair under the locked door knob of his room, lays down salt lines and rolls out the Devil’s Trap prayer rug he picked up in Manila two years ago just in front of the barricaded door. John had scoffed at the rug, but Dean had pointed out that it was a hell of a lot quicker and more portable than carving a Trap into a floor or ceiling, and John had just thinned his lips and looked away.</p><p> </p><p>After putting his M1911 on the bed by the single, sad and misshapen pillow, Dean dumps John’s bag onto the mattress.</p><p> </p><p>This is it. John Winchester hadn’t lived long enough. Had only been fifty-two, and Dean still couldn’t…</p><p> </p><p>Guns. Knives. Hex bags. A half-smoked cigar. A Bible. A flask and a canteen and a handful of rosaries.</p><p> </p><p>The journal Dean doesn’t want to touch. Has to polish off half a bottle of what must surely be whiskey from a barrel cured in horse piss before he can stand to touch it.</p><p> </p><p>He flips through it, trying not to read the words, not to see John’s hand forming the words, the furrow between his brows as he would fight to recall everything important enough to commit to paper. Photographs are wedged between the pages. </p><p> </p><p>Mary Campbell and John Winchester, young and smiling and just married. </p><p> </p><p>Mary holding a fat, unhappy baby that Dean knows was him.</p><p> </p><p>Mary holding Dean again, older, maybe as old as four.</p><p> </p><p>Mary holding another fat baby, this one grinning wide and easy and Mary doing the same. Sam, who maybe never again grinned like that.</p><p> </p><p>Dean in his uniform, eight years ago when he’d been a fresh recruit burning with the need to do something and dumb enough to think he could. </p><p> </p><p>Sam in his uniform, the photograph taken only a few weeks after Dean’s own. Where Dean had looked cocky and confident, from the tilt of his garrison cap to the curve of his lips, Sam looked serious and sad.</p><p> </p><p>The pages stick together with blood in a few places, and Dean doesn’t try to pry them apart. Doesn’t want to see what he’s missed.</p><p> </p><p>When he was younger, Dean had read this journal with the same kind of reverence Sam read the Torah. </p><p> </p><p>And now that Dean thought about it, Sam read this journal the way Dean read the Torah - with trepidation and unwillingness. </p><p> </p><p>Dean flips to the end of the journal just as he gets to the end of the bottle and-</p><p> </p><p>And the last three pages have been ripped out.</p><p> </p><p>They aren’t the only missing pages.</p><p> </p><p>Spread throughout the journal are individual missing pages, a few sections, all neatly cut away close to the spine and never, ever explained by John and never questioned by Dean.</p><p> </p><p>These pages, though - these haven’t been cut away. </p><p> </p><p>They’ve been torn, roughly and unevenly, leaving behind letters and words and an indecipherable sketch.</p><p> </p><p>Dean knows there is no way John Winchester tore these pages out.</p><p> </p><p>And he knows, he knows he has seen that sketch before - the scratch of lines that might be runes, might be Hebrew - and Dean knows it is Hebrew, and he knows he should know the letters that come next, that have been torn away with the rest of the sketch, but he doesn’t.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>In the morning, Dean does not get up. He opens his eyes and swears he is dying and wonders why there isn’t a power in the universe with enough benevolence to let him die.</p><p> </p><p>He drinks the canteen of tepid, stale holy water that John’s bag had held and that had ended up swept onto the floor with everything else when Dean finally gave into his anger and tears the night before.</p><p> </p><p>And then he buries his head under the pillow and hopes to never wake up again.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>There is still enough daylight left when Dean drags himself out of the bar/tavern/saloon that he decides to start driving.</p><p> </p><p>No sense putting off the inevitable.</p><p> </p><p>And if Sam hasn’t heard yet, then that means Dean is going to be the one to tell his kid brother that their father is dead.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>Dean has never said it, but he likes California.</p><p> </p><p>Has held tight to every memory he has of the state, from the hunt John went on near the Oregon border when Dean was twelve and he took care of Sam for a week while not knowing if John was dead or alive to going to see Sam two days before Dean enlisted but being too chickenshit to do more than watch Sam walk across the surreal campus of that surreal place with a beautiful, laughing blonde-haired woman at his side and a smile on his face that is almost, almost like the one in the photograph taken a lifetime ago.</p><p> </p><p>Still, when he parks his bike outside of the place where Sam lives these days - an old Victorian three-storey house split into apartments, with Sam’s on the bottom floor - Dean wishes he was anywhere else.</p><p> </p><p>He hefts his duffel and John’s haversack and breaks into Sam’s apartment via the backyard and sits himself down on a well-used, too-comfortable sofa and waits.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>Dean is still waiting the next morning, though his sit had long-ceased to even be a slump, and when he wakes up, he finds there is a wet spot of drool under his cheek and his face and arms have impressions from the textured fabric of the sofa.</p><p> </p><p>Finally, just when Dean starts to actively freak out - if John is dead, what’s to stop Sam from being dead too? - night has fallen again and Sam tumbles into the apartment with a burst of laughter and talk and the smell of food and a feminine voice, and before Dean knows it, he and Sam are a tangle of limbs and violence on the floor.</p><p> </p><p>He gets in a few good hits, takes more than he wants to, but in the end, Dean is straddling Sam and pinning his giant brother’s giant hands against the floor when Sam finally recognizes him.</p><p> </p><p>That’s also the moment when Dean becomes aware of a gun pressed to the back of his skull.</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t let go of Sam’s hands and the gun doesn’t move, and for a moment, for a moment, Dean feels horribly, fantastically stuck in his skin and his head in a way he hasn’t since… since as long as he can remember.</p><p> </p><p>Then Sam is talking.</p><p> </p><p>“Jess, it’s okay. It’s just Dean.”</p><p> </p><p>The gun is gone - but no safety is thumbed on, and Dean is all-too aware that the warm presence that smells like flowers and sunshine is only just behind him, maybe three steps back on the left. Jess. Jessica. Jessica Moore, Dean imagines. The same girl Dean had spotted by Sam’s side almost a decade ago, and there’s something about that, something that makes Dean want to sag in relief and snarl in anger at the same time.</p><p> </p><p>“Heya, Sammy,” he says instead, and plasters his best, his worst grin onto his face.</p><p> </p><p>“Get off of me, Dean,” Sam says, not protesting the nickname, not looking up at Dean at all.</p><p> </p><p>Sam shoves a little, and Dean more or less - more - lets himself be rolled off and ends up with his ass on the floor beside Sam and a full view of Jess standing over them.</p><p> </p><p>She is more beautiful than he remembers, wears a nurse’s uniform and has her blonde hair pulled into a bun at the back of her neck, and there is distrust in her eyes, and her entire body quivers with tension.</p><p> </p><p>“Hey, I’m Dean,” he addresses her, giving her nothing she apparently didn’t already know. </p><p> </p><p>“Jessica. Why are you here?”</p><p> </p><p>She is angry and unforgiving and-</p><p> </p><p>Sam puts one of those large hands on Dean’s shoulder, and for a moment, Dean has to wonder if this is all a dream.</p><p> </p><p>“Jess, can you give me a minute with him? It’s okay. I promise.”</p><p> </p><p>She gives Dean one last glare, picks up the spilled bag of food - Chinese, Dean realizes, places the smell and is struck with an unwelcome memory of the last meal he and Sam shared, before Sam announced he was leaving to go to college and John told his youngest son to leave and never come back.</p><p> </p><p>Both Sam and Dean watch her turn and walk away. Neither of them relax or move.</p><p> </p><p>“Dean, why are you here?” Sam repeats her question.</p><p> </p><p>Swallowing is a suddenly awful task. And a reminder that, no, this is not a dream. Dean has never, ever had that kind of luck.</p><p> </p><p>“Dad’s dead.” He makes himself say the words, feels them form in his mouth, their leaden weight sinking from his tongue to his gut and-</p><p> </p><p>Sam’s hand grips his shoulder tighter, for just a second, hard and painful and more real than the last decade of Dean’s life. Then Sam is on his feet, and there is once again an ocean between Sam and Dean.</p><p> </p><p>“What happened to him?” Sam asks, and there is nothing in his voice. </p><p> </p><p>Nothing of the kid who used to be glued to Dean’s side. Of the kid who talked back to John when Dean was helpless to do more than stare between the two polar axes of his life. Of the man in uniform who was as buttoned-up in duty as wool. Of the laughter and sunshine Dean had once spied on and had just had spilled over him before he put a stop to that too.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>In the end, Jess is the one to insist Dean sleep on their sofa. Sam is nursing a glass of whiskey and ignoring the both of them, and Jess’s eyes make it clear that she would like to turn whatever repressed homicidal urges she may have been hoarding for her entire life onto Dean and rip him apart and cut him out of Sam’s life and memories.</p><p> </p><p>If he could, Dean would hand her the scalpel. Would hold still and let her do it.</p><p> </p><p>But Sam has John’s journal open on the tiny kitchen table, and from the sofa, Dean watches Sam thumbing the ripped-out pages and Jess taking the whiskey away from Sam and finishing it herself before pouring another glass for the two of them to presumably share.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>Sam throws a towel at Dean, both to wake him up and, presumably, to allow him to make use of the shower.</p><p> </p><p>Dean scrubs himself quickly, still half-asleep, and as such, makes the mistake of using whatever bar of soap must belong to Jess because he steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and flowers, and Jess actually laughs at him while Sam just glares.</p><p> </p><p>But there is coffee and toast and scrambled eggs, and Sam even shares them with Dean while the three of them sit at the small kitchen table, and Dean wonders what it would feel like to belong here.</p><p> </p><p>“Maṭṭeh,” is the first and only thing Sam says while Dean shovels food into his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>“Excuse you?” Dean tries and earns two glares. This feels too… too wanted. Dean takes a scalding gulp of coffee.</p><p> </p><p>“The rod,” Jess says, voice detached - though not without scorn - and- </p><p> </p><p>Dean hadn’t realized.</p><p> </p><p>He looks at her again - stares, actually - and sees the glint of gold at her throat and- </p><p> </p><p>And that is the little six-pointed star that Dean himself had given Sam for his bar mitzvah, because even though Dean never cared about it or anything else much that wasn’t his family, Sam had clung to their mother’s religion with a stubbornness and futileness that only Bobby Singer and Rufus Turner had ever encouraged. And Dean had always thought they did it as much out of love for Sam as antipathy for John, and both things were too natural for Dean to ever question or get between them.</p><p> </p><p>Huh.</p><p> </p><p>Dean pulls his gaze back up to Jess’s face, and she has an eyebrow arched at him, and Dean wonders how long she has worn the necklace, wonders if Sam gave it to her before or after the war, wonders, feeling sick, if Sam was in Germany with it around his neck or not.</p><p> </p><p>“What rod?” he makes himself ask and hates the pitch of his voice.</p><p> </p><p>Sam is scowling, but that look is familiar. Sam has more than a dozen scowls, maybe as many as a hundred, and Dean is well-versed in nearly all of them.</p><p> </p><p>This is the scowl of internal frustration and nagging curiosity.</p><p> </p><p>Dean isn’t the only one who thinks he should know what the remains of that sketch are.</p><p> </p><p>Jess doesn’t seem to know either, and Dean feels a petty kernel of triumph over that.</p><p> </p><p>“I need to go to the library,” Sam announces, and Dean can’t even remember the last time he heard Sam say that, but it feels like it was just yesterday, even though he knows it was so, so, so long ago.</p><p> </p><p>Jess’s lips curl, and Dean feels the same expression on his own mouth, and Sam rolls his eyes, and the moment is…</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>Jess has work, apparently, at the hospital.</p><p> </p><p>Dean and Sam walk into a library that is washed golden in sunlight and somewhere between empty and not empty enough.</p><p> </p><p>Dean makes it two hours, sitting across from Sam at a table and leafing through book after book and wishing like hell he’d taken Rufus’ Hebrew lessons anywhere near as serious as he had taken Bobby’s instructions on how to fix and destroy anything at all mechanical.</p><p> </p><p>Sam, who knew Hebrew and Latin, and what the hell, Ancient Greek now, didn’t even look up from the collection of open books in front of him and the notepad he was scribbling on when Dean finally gets to his feet.</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t break anything,” is all Sam says as Dean shoves his hands into his pockets and starts to wander.</p><p> </p><p>Dean spends maybe half an hour aimlessly watching kids sweat over homework, old men in sweaters and glasses laboriously transcribe things, and flirts with two librarians until a third intimidates even Dean into rethinking sex in the stacks.</p><p> </p><p>Then he goes in search of vampires, because there are always books on vampires, in every library, no matter how academic.</p><p> </p><p>It had started in his youth as a kind of rebellion. John would leave them behind on a hunt, and Sam would insist on going to a library to do whatever the hell he usually did with books, and Dean, angry and hurt and twisting with unwanted juvenile emotions, found books on the occult and laboriously corrected them. Defaced them, Sam would call it if he knew what Dean did.</p><p> </p><p>But there was something deeply satisfying about that kind of petty rebellion - scratching words into pages not meant for the eyes of hunters, using the words John had given Dean, the knowledge that had to be kept away from the mass of sheep they protected. And maybe, maybe someone, somewhere, would read the note that you have to cut off their head and maybe, maybe, it would save someone’s life.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>He is on his fourth book, has traversed the library too much and actually found a spot he likes, out of the way, back in a corner but windows to one side and a stairwell to another and great sightlines for all that he is hard to spot, when his hand is stopped midword.</p><p> </p><p>Long, elegant fingers. Golden hair on the back of the knuckles, tiny scars that are ghostly white on tanned skin. They wrap around Dean’s wrist and stay his pen, and Dean swallows down the first seven things he wants to say and makes himself stay still instead of lashing out with his first seven physical urges, and he breathes.</p><p> </p><p>Looks up.</p><p> </p><p>It’s a guy in a cardigan. Thin, wire-rimmed glasses. Eyes that are the kind of blue that reminds Dean of the Pacific and the sky and the one time John dumped them in Florida and Dean held Sam in the warm water of the Atlantic and they laughed as waves crashed around them.</p><p> </p><p>“I do believe that any editorial comments you care to offer Mr. Stoker should be written into your schoolwork and not left in the margins of this novel.”</p><p> </p><p>The voice is a drawl, full lips forming around the words in an accent that is at once ridiculous and intoxicating, and it is impossible for Dean to wrap his head around- around anything.</p><p> </p><p>How are the man’s eyes this blue?</p><p> </p><p>His hair is golden too, like those delicate little hairs on his knuckles, and Dean is reminded of something his father once grumbled - no grown man has blond hair - and Dean’s own hair had been nearly bleached with sun when he came back from the Philippines, and he had worn a hat for months before brown finally crept back to dominance.</p><p> </p><p>Dean is suddenly, achingly aware of the solid heat of the man, the bulk of his body and the width of his shoulders, and he isn’t like the other cardigans here, despite the glasses and attire. His eyes and his grip and his skin tell an entirely different story, and Dean can’t help himself when the man speaks again.</p><p> </p><p>He watches those full, dark lips and drinks in the words and that honeyed tone.</p><p> </p><p>“And besides your personal vendetta against Dr. Van Helsing, I do believe your comments about dear Miss Lucy are entirely uncalled for.”</p><p> </p><p>The man is holding up a book, another copy of Dracula that Dean had already gotten his hands on, and it is open to the page where Dean had scrawled a messy note about Lucy needing to get laid and find better friends who gave a damn that she was acting crazy instead of draping her with garlic like she was already dead.</p><p> </p><p>Dean looks from the pages to the man’s face again and licks his own lips, can’t help it, doesn’t even mean it as a flirtation because he’s not an idiot but-</p><p> </p><p>But the man’s eyes track the movement, and the pressure on Dean’s wrist tightens for just a moment before sliding away altogether.</p><p> </p><p>“The entire point,” the man is talking again, and Dean feels like a fly trapped in amber, warm and surrounded and helpless, “is that sexual desire is the door through which we both find and lose ourselves. If Miss Lucy went out and ‘took care of her needs’, as you put it - well, as you could have put it if you had wanted to be a little less crude - then where would that leave us dear readers and our own desires, hm?”</p><p> </p><p>Dean has absolutely no idea what the hell the man is talking about but wants to think it’s sex, wants to think it’s-</p><p> </p><p>The man is gone as suddenly as he had arrived, snapping the book in Dean’s hands closed and taking it away with the other already in his hands and leaving Dean struggling to remember whether or not breathing is a thing he should do.</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p> </p><p>That night, Dean makes meatloaf, and Sam and Jess stare at both Dean and the food as if unsure either merit their trust or bravery. But after Dean starts in on his second slice, they both eat, and their little noises of surprised pleasure are, weirdly, damn nice to hear.</p><p> </p><p>Sam admits defeat with his research, and Jess rubs her hand over his and suggests they speak with Professor Blanc, who she took a class with once, or with Rabbi Bass, whose name makes both Sam and Jess blush.</p><p> </p><p>Dean and Sam rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes to who, and Dean remembers the first time they did this. Sam had gotten his hands on a copy of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia in the summer of ‘29 and insisted he and Dean solve all further disputes with the game instead of Dean simply using his size and age to get what he wanted. Subsequently, Sam always gets his way.</p><p> </p><p>So Sam goes to Rabbi Bass with a hasty copy of the torn sketch, and Dean takes the original with him to the Stanford Campus wearing a borrowed shirt from Sam’s closet and the single pair of threadbare trousers he has, pressed to an inch of his life under Jess’s amused eye and Sam’s indifference.</p><p> </p><p>Professor Blanc has a morning class, according to the department secretary. Instead of waiting around and fighting the urge to break into the man’s office, Dean finds the classroom and settles himself in the back, surrounded by bright-eyed, smooth-skinned children and wonders how anyone can have eyes so wide open and yet be so very blind.</p><p> </p><p>The class has, according to Dean’s watch, already started when Professor Blanc walks in. </p><p> </p><p>An apology is already falling from his mouth, full lips pulled wide in a charming smile that no one could deny, when Professor Blanc looks over the little auditorium full of students and his gaze finds Dean.</p><p> </p><p>It’s the cardigan from the library. Golden and glowing today, in a suit and tie and crisp white shirt that Dean suddenly, very much, wants to ruin.</p><p> </p><p>Blanc recovers, jerks his gaze away from Dean, and proceeds to give an hour-long lecture on the Napoleonic army’s insatiable acquisition of antiquities while in Egypt.</p><p> </p><p>Egypt. Rod.</p><p> </p><p>Dean isn’t actually an idiot, for all that everyone in his life might want to argue the point, and he has to give credit to Jess - she knows her shit, and Sam is damn lucky to have a girl he could open himself up to. </p><p> </p><p>Once, Dean had tried to do that. Cassie Robinson had called him crazy and threatened to kill him herself if he ever haunted her door again after that attempt.</p><p> </p><p>Dean lingers after the class is dismissed, smirks while he watches Blanc fend off the attentions and questions of attractive female students and even one very bold male student.</p><p> </p><p>And then it is just the two of them, Dean still at the back of the auditorium, Blanc still at the front.</p><p> </p><p>“I need your help,” Dean finally said into the warm, heavy air between them.</p><p> </p><p>Blanc looked up, full lips twitching.</p><p> </p><p>“Why, have you run out of copies of Dracula to deface and find yourself in need of more?”</p><p> </p><p>Dean unfolds from the desk he has been occupying and walks down to Blanc. The man’s blue eyes are cataloguing every step Dean takes, and it is… nice in a way Dean hasn’t felt in a very long time to have another man’s eyes taking him apart this intensely.</p><p> </p><p>Without an explanation, Dean presents the journal, the ripped sketch, and Blanc takes it into his hands and frowns.</p><p> </p><p>They’re of a height, though Blanc might actually be an inch or two shorter. His shoulders and chest are wider, though, and standing this close, it is difficult for Dean to not move even closer.</p><p> </p><p> “Maṭṭeh,” Blanc says, and the word is charged in his voice, for all that it sounds foreign in the curl of his accent. Not at all like the familiar press of Hebrew around Dean, who maybe struggled to read it but knew his prayers and cherished the memories of falling to sleep listening to Sam practice for his bar mitzvah.</p><p> </p><p>“Rod, yeah. So, Moses had one of those, right?” Dean spills the words out so he stops thinking so damn much.</p><p> </p><p>Blanc frowns, though and shakes his head.</p><p> </p><p>“Pretty sure he did,” Dean argues.</p><p> </p><p>Full lips quirk up in one corner.</p><p> </p><p>“Do not tell me your literary efforts extend to the King James,” Blanc suggests.</p><p> </p><p>Dean snorts a laugh but doesn’t bother to deny it. He’s written more than a few words in the margins of Bibles, and none were as nice as the notes he leaves in Dracula.</p><p> </p><p>“This,” Blanc traces one finger over the frayed edge of paper, the black curve of a line, “is a leaf.”</p><p> </p><p>Dean looks away from Blanc’s nails, short and blunt and so very clean, and to the curve and- </p><p> </p><p>“A rod with leaves? Like a tree?”</p><p> </p><p>Blanc is smiling at him now, something warm and proud, and Dean has to swallow and duck his head.</p><p> </p><p>“Perhaps,” is what Blanc says, though. “A rod with leaves, however… Moses wasn’t the only man in Egypt with a rod.”</p><p> </p><p>This, this is the time to make a crude joke, the kind that Dean used to mutter around Sam to make his kid brother blush and to practice his own facade of cool and calm when John wasn’t around. The kind that Dean had heard and exchanged countless times with the tired, sweaty men of Bravo Company during the war or with the poor assholes slogging alongside him during basic training. The kind that he made when hustling pool or playing poker or drinking in dark, stinking bars.</p><p> </p><p>With heroic effort, Dean swallows it down. </p><p> </p><p>And then breaks into a cough-laugh when he realizes what he just did.</p><p> </p><p>He feels more than a little hysterical when Blanc arches an eyebrow at him.</p><p> </p><p>“He wasn’t, huh?” is all Dean can choke out.</p><p> </p><p>Blanc rolls his eyes, the gesture so much like Sam’s own that Dean feels at once giddy and bereft.</p><p> </p><p>“He had a brother,” Blanc says, as if reading Dean’s mind.</p><p> </p><p>And-</p><p> </p><p>“Aaron,” Dean remembers, suddenly the words, the stories coalescing in his mind, and-</p><p> </p><p>“Hm,” Blanc’s murmur brings them to a crashing halt. “It was said that the rod of Aaron found its way into the Ark of God.”</p><p> </p><p>“The Ark of the Covenant.” Sam had said that, once, had said that it was in the Christian Bible, and Sam always, always wondered at the differences in the Christians’ book and his own.</p><p> </p><p>“Indeed,” Blanc agrees and hands the journal back to Dean unasked for. </p><p> </p><p>Dean clutches it close to his chest and cannot figure out what the damned hell John had gotten himself into.</p><p> </p><p>Three missing pages. A missing arm. A missing eye. Idaho. </p><p> </p><p>“Perhaps,” the word is a purr from Blanc’s mouth, and Dean looks up to see what those full lips will shape into next, “perhaps, you and I can go back to my office, and you can explain to me why this is of interest to you, Mr.…?”</p><p> </p><p>Dean has to take a moment to swallow and put his mind into order and realizes he hasn’t actually felt this out of sorts since Cassie. Since Sam left for Stanford. Since the first time he shot a fellow GI after seeing him brutalize a skinny, brown-skinned kid in Manila and-</p><p> </p><p>“Dean Winchester.” He slides one hand into Blanc’s warm, waiting palm and doesn’t even regret the truth of his name or the thrum of his own pulse under Blanc’s firm, gentle grasp.</p><p> </p><p>“A pleasure to meet you.” Blanc’s smile is slightly crooked and all the more perfect for it, Dean thinks.</p><p> </p><p>“Same.”</p><p> </p><p>-o-</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I</p><p>uh</p><p>Want to write more but also holy shit I have so much to write??</p><p>-o-</p><p>A special thanks to Sarah, who did not ask for this, but let my dumbass gentile self info dump on her all the same and offered support and enthusiasm and honestly what better gifts can we humans give each other?</p></blockquote><div class="children module" id="children">
  <b class="heading">Works inspired by this one:</b>
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        <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24105889">[Podfic of] Claim Your Ghost</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish%20Pods">Flowerparrish Pods (Flowerparrish)</a>
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